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ANDY BOSTOM: THE JOURNALISM OF ANNE BARNARD THAT FAILED…….

Andy takes a look into the unethical, morally and historically challenged scriblings of Anne Barnard on the Ground Zero mosque imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf. Such writings conjurs up an earlier age during the height of the Soviet Union’s power and presitge, which held sway over many of the world’s journalists, including the most nortorius of them, NYT ”journalist”, Walter Duranty.
We all know that nothing has changed since that time, with journalists plying their trade with the same zeal for intellectual dishonesty and lackluster quality journalism as many of their peers in times past. Bostom shows once again why journalism today is in dire need of a new breed of hard hitting, fact driven journalists and why he himself, Bostom, is someone worth reading. KGS

The Journalism That Failed—Anne Barnard’s New York Times Agitprop on Imam Feisal Rauf

Anne Barnard: Reporting, or playing Wonderland croquet with herself?
After reading a studious account of Imam Feisal Rauf’s Malaysian activities by my journalist colleague Alyssa Lappen, and listening to an interview of the courageous investigative reporter Steven Emerson, who has compiled recorded evidence of Rauf’s Islamic radicalism based upon hours of audio taped lectures and statements, I read Anne Barnard’s New York Times 8/21-22/2010 piece, entitled “Balancing Act for Imam in Muslim Center Furor.”
Reading Ms. Barnard’s story reminded me of Arthur Koestler’s description in “The God That Failed” of working for the Soviet Agitprop EKKI as a “delegate of the Revolutionary Proletarian Writers of Germany.” Koestler was a brilliant writer, but before qualifying for this particular writing assignment, he had gradually learned from his willing Communist indoctrination,Extraordinarily well-paid for rather minimal effort, Koestler described how it was

 Similarly, you will not find a word of criticism of the irredentist Islamic societies Feisal Rauf frequents in Ms. Barnard’s hagiography of the “peacemaking, moderate imam.” Instead, Ann Bernard and those of her ilk consciously champion the Sharia-based Islamic totalitarianism embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Imam Rauf. Koestler’s story, contrastingly, is a brutally honest, wrenching mea culpa which concludes with insights thus far unattainable by doctrinaire, willfully blind cultural relativist journalists such as Barnard. Her work epitomizes the journalism that has failed.
Arthur Koestler’s experiences, and reflections upon them, are critically relevant to the present age. Anne Barnard and an entire generation of like-minded journalists, so enamored of Islamic totalitarianism, ignore Koestler’s insights on Communist totalitarianism at great peril to our most fundamental freedoms. Will she, and they, continue on in the ignominious path of the New York Times’ own “Pulitzer Prize-winning” shill for Communist totalitarianism, the utterly mendacious Walter Duranty*, who despite first hand knowledge to the contrary, denied the genocidal famine the Soviets deliberately orchestrated in the Ukraine, and unlike Koestler never recanted those reports? [*See Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow,” pp. 319-20]

…a pleasant feeling to have a nest egg in the Socialist sixth of the earth. In exceptional cases the State Publishing Trust is even authorized to convert part of the sum into the author’s home currency and to send it to him in monthly installments. I know of two famous exiled German authors in France who for years drew monthly royalty checks of this kind, though one of them had never published a book in Russia. Both were passionate and lucid critics of democratic corruption; neither of them has ever written a word of criticism of the Soviet Union.
…to distrust my mechanistic pre-occupation with facts and to regard the world around me the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

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